Excel as BI Front-End Tool (from Business Intelligence Blog)

"I’m very happy to announce that finally I submit the chapter for the next MVP Deep Dives Book that I’m a co-author with some other MVP professionals around the world. The book will be published next October and for sure I’ll give you here more news about it."

Pedro from BI Blog

http://pedrocgd.blogspot.com/2011/06/bi-book-excel-as-bi-front-end-tool.html

XlsWorkbookSecuring3D from VG-EXCEL-GEST

XlsWorkbookSecuring3D is a model (template) Excel editable with a three-dimensional system of protection.

1D - Anti-copy system which requires the introduction of a serial number license for each copy.

2D - Control system of users with different privileges.

3D - System of protection of workbooks and worksheets customizable for each sheet.

XlsWorkbookSecuring3D is a blank Excel workbook format exe for Excel 2007/2010, where you can build your spreadsheet model simple or advanced with or without macros during a free period (trial license usually 45 days, customizable) and passed only this time the workbook opens by license activation through a serial number unique license per copy provided by us.

You can use this model to develop your personal Excel projects or projects of your company or to sell their projects to others, with the assurance that they will not be copied or altered easily at least.

http://vg-excel-gest-products.weebly.com/index.html

Microsoft | PowerPivot

PowerPivot gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organizations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools.

http://www.powerpivot.com/index.aspx

QlikView - BI for the business user

http://www.qlikview.com/

Dundas - Interactive Dashboard Samples and Gallery

http://www.dundas.com/

Visual Complexity... Take a tour on this space!

You should not miss a stroll in the work presented in this space. 

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

New and improved functionality in MS Excel 2010 for PivotTables

What is one of the most important tool of Excel for you? I personally think that Pivot Tables should be the one… Is a great reporting tool for your needs and easy to use. Take the advantage of this to optimize your reports only with a few steps. You can summarize your data as you want… Sum, count, sort, average… The results are displayed in seconds.
Lose a little time to learn more about Pivot Tables and you see that you will not regret.

Get inspired...

... with Tableau!
http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Traffic-Light Charts to Delight Managers (from ExcelUser)

"Your managers will love traffic-light charts. Here's why...

Managers tend to experience at least two challenges with charts. First, as they glance over reports, they must pause at each chart to determine whether an upward trend is a good result (with sales, for example) or is a bad result (with costs, for example). They could scan results much more quickly if each chart made it obvious whether the current results show good or bad news. "
http://exceluser.com/catalog2/addins/kyd-sa.htm#TrafficLight

My next personal challenge: iPhone/iPad development on Windows

For a few months ago I was thinking to start learn how to develop dashboards to be used on iPhone/iPad. I have found some solutions, like Phonegap and Appcelerator using html/javascript solution for this and it seems to be a good solution. I am a rookie on this kind of development so fill free to give me a feedback if you know a better way to do it. Thanks!

Visualize This (from FlowingData)

For sure it will be a good book to read...
"A book by Nathan Yau who writes for FlowingData, Visualize This is a practical guide on visualization and how to approach real-world data. The book is published by Wiley and is available for pre-order on Amazon and other major online booksellers. Available July 2011."
http://flowingdata.com/book/

2 excellent articles from Clearly & Simply

Charts in Excel Table TooltipsHow to display a Chart in the Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables visualizing the selected value within the context of the data distribution.
http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/05/charts-in-excel-table-tooltips.html

Tooltips on Microsoft Excel TablesHow to display Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables including additional information on the selected cell and aggregation results for the entire column.
http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/05/tooltips-on-microsoft-excel-tables.html

Highlight

When we have a database we could have some difficults to read the "row" and the "column". With a highlight will be easier... Just press "Alt"+"F11" and insert the code in the respective sheet:

A few formulas for "dates"

Usefull VLOOKUP formulas without "#N/A"

If you are using VLOOKUP function you know the result "#N/A". To avoid this result you can return "0" (zero) or " " (empty space):

Excel how to videos on Youtube

Excel "how to" videos on Youtube are a great source of knowledge. You can learn several tips for help you on your daily work.

You can find videos about anything that you need and see step by step how is done.  



Sparklines

A sparkline is a type of data visualization, graphic information. Edward Tufte was the author for the name sparkline as “small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images.”. Sparklines are the best option for you build your dashboards exactly because of that. A good example of what can be done is this one:

http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/2008/11/first-example-file.html

Dilbert...

Dilbert by Scott Adams  -  www.dilbert.com/

Spice up your Choropleth Maps with Excel (from Clearly and Simply)

A good article from Clearly and Simply with a few tips tips how to mitigate some of the disadvantages of Choropleth Maps in Microsoft Excel. Please see the following link http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2010/02/spice-up-your-choropleth-maps-with-excel.html

How long your macros run?

Do you know how much time your macro takes to run? Sometimes we create some macros that takes to much time to run but don’t know exactly how much. This code below is useful to use when we get a large of data from an external data source…

Dim strTimeStart as String
Dim strTimeFinish as String
strTimeStart = Time()
[Insert your vba code here]
strTimeFinish = Time()
MsgBox "Your macro takes " & DateDiff("s", strTimeStart, strTimeFinish) & “ seconds to run!”

With this information you can decide if is better to split the code in two or more macros and insert a status message in the middle, or leave like it is and just inform the users that your macro will take “x” minutes to run…

Knowing exactly the time that your macros takes to run you can take advantage to build better and organize your report(s).